Miyazawa Kenji

Miyazaki Kenji was born in Hanamaki, Iwate, an impoverished farming district in northeastern Japan in 1896. Although relatively well off as the son of a pawn broker, he devoted his life to improving the spiritual and material lives of those around him. He did well at the Morioka Higher Agricultural and Forestry School, and spent the non-writing part of his career in a soil survey, teaching farming methods (both in a local high school and through farmers groups he organized) and promoting agrarian art.

His first publications were The Restaurant of Many Orders and a book of poetry in 1918. No doubt it is vain to say anyone wrote autobiographical fantasies for children, but considering Miyazawa's history and his philosophy as expressed in Ame ni mo Makezu, one suspects he was more than a translator for Kost's recollections of Polano Square. When Miyazawa dies in 1933 (although according to Kodansha's Encyclopaedia of Japan, "the country folk of Iwate fondly remember him as 'Kenji bosatsu' or 'Kenji the bodhisattva for his efforts to help poor farmers." The popularity of his works increased after the war, perhaps because a new philosophy of cooperative self-reliance was needed for the years of recovery.

• Polano Square
  • Introduction
  • The Runaway Goat
  • The Light of the Pearlwort
  • Polano Square
  • The Police Bureau
  • Poison Moths of Cendad
  • Wind and Grass Seed and The Last Song
• Ame ni mo Makezu
• The Restaurant of Many Orders
• Across the Snow